Xref: utzoo comp.lang.misc:6107 alt.lang.cfutures:289 Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!lavaca.uh.edu!menudo.uh.edu!nuchat!sugar!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,alt.lang.cfutures Subject: Changes to C... Message-ID: Date: 19 Nov 90 19:35:37 GMT References: <9576:Nov1523:11:0990@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <6096@lanl.gov> <14780:Nov1605:10:4490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1990Nov18.033622.1517@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 21 I've been skipping most of the articles in this thread, but the following sentence brings up an interesting thought... In article <1990Nov18.033622.1517@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> gl8f@astsun9.astro.virginia.edu (Greg Lindahl) writes: > If you study this example, you'll see ways in which C can be changed > to make it more useful for a wider class of problems. My initial reaction to most of the problems with C that people bring up is "yep, probably right... but how do you fix the language without either changing it into something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike C or by making the coder's job immensely harder?". C is not going to go away any time soon. Like Fortran, it's widely available and there is a great deal of uniformity among the runtime libraries thanks to the relatively clean UNIX programmer interface they're modelled on. If you're writing a program you want to run on more than one platform, and it's not an engineering/science support program, about the only choice is C (or, maybe one day real soon, C++: but coding in C++ is like coding in Ratfor). How would you fix C without breaking a lot of C code? -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180. 'U` peter@ferranti.com